[EM] Purpose of a poll

[Joseph Malkevitch]

Readers of and those who post regularly to this list participate for a variety of reasons.

In my case, though now retired, I taught mathematics courses of different kinds. I wanted to show my students the value of mathematical thinking in understanding "fairness" questions. Via this list I learned lots of things beyond what I learned from the "scholarly" literature about fairness, which is vast and sometimes beyond my ability to decipher. As a scholar I made no significant contribution but as a teacher many students learned some of the complexities of "being fair." One message I showed my students consistently was that for many kinds of ballot types, when there were many choices to choose among,  that even assuming honest ballots, there are different "appealing" methods of picking a single winner where the different decision methods yielded different winners when applied to a particular set of ballots produced by the voters. This led scholars such as Arrow, Sen, Gibbard, Satterthwaite, Black, etc. to study the fairness properties (axioms) obeyed by different systems and show that some lists of fairness rules cannot be met by any decision method consistent with "democracy." Furthermore, there are appealing election methods where with large numbers of ballots of some kinds even very fast computers cannot determine a winner in a reasonable amount of time.

As regards the poll, we know there is data that suggests that the order of the choices on the ballot can affect the results so I would recommend if a poll is conducted that the choices be listed randomly. Also there are currently nominated choices where I do not understand how these methods work. It would be useful to have succinct descriptions of the methods listed when carried out with the ballot type used.  While I understand that there are downsides, I like encouraging honest ordinal ballots where all choices must appear with no ties (e.g. strict preferences; truncation not allowed). So votes in my classes were done that way. For the proposed poll there are so many choices already that even reporting only a vote matrix showing how many voters reported X preferred to Y and Y preferred to X would be a large array.

Best wishes,

Joe

——————————————
Joseph Malkevitch

Email:
jmalkevitch at york.cuny.edu
Web page:
http://york.cuny.edu/~malk/
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